Hugo Ulloa, a fluid dynamics scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, with Daisuke Noto, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Arts & Sciences, and Juvenal A. Letelier of the University of Chile, has published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academies of the Sciences exploring convection from its smallest scale. The researchers investigated how fluids behave and how heat is transferred in environments that are super-confined, revealing fundamental insights to the rules governing fluid mechanics.

“These findings not only address longstanding issues in our field but could also pave the way for more efficient geothermal energy harvesting, biomedical devices that need precise heat controls to mix compounds or in computer cooling systems, which are becoming increasingly powerful and, as a result, power hungry and dissipating more and more heat," says Ullo.

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